


babel

by cirrus (themorninglark)



Series: Sportsfest 2018 [40]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, Sportsfest 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 03:51:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15573129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/cirrus
Summary: You were always ready to be apart, but you always thought it’d be you on the road. You forced yourself to get used to planes and trains and buses. The thing is, athletes retire young, and you never mastered the art of sleeping on a moving vehicle.Most likely to be in a long-distance relationship: Kageyama Tobio





	babel

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Sportsfest 2018 Bonus Round 3: Superlatives | [originally posted here](https://sportsfest.dreamwidth.org/10320.html?thread=1983312#cmt1983312)

_coffee.  
_ You fall into habits far too quickly. When he is gone, you take out two mugs in the morning and make too much coffee. When he is back, you take out only one mug and make too little. You never realise what you’ve done until it is too late.

It’s fine, he tells you, he is perfectly capable of making his own coffee and there are some mornings he wants tea anyway. He learned how to forgive you long ago. Sometimes you think you are still learning to forgive yourself.

_sleep.  
_ You were always ready to be apart, but you always thought it’d be you on the road. You forced yourself to get used to planes and trains and buses. The thing is, athletes retire young, and you never mastered the art of sleeping on a moving vehicle. He did. He can fall asleep anywhere. When you pick him up from the airport at 5 AM and he rests his head on your shoulder in the cab, you think you could drift off too, right then.

_sashimi.  
_ He comes back from Seattle with a mug from the original Starbucks. This was the highlight of his trip, he says. The convention was boring and there was no time to explore the art museum and the fish market was tasty but expensive. He can order salmon in six different languages. You point out that _sashimi_ is the same the world round, and he laughs, clear and bright. The sound of his laughter still surprises you every time.

_untranslatable.  
_ He told you once about a word he could not translate. You were stepping all over his toes on a pier in Barcelona, the guitar lush in the night, the flames of a flamenco licking at your heels. _Duende_ means life, he says, but it’s more than that, it is the moment you are _most_ alive and all your emotions are lit up on the inside and you want to burst, you want to take your heart out of your chest and watch it break the hell out of here like a hurricane of butterflies. It will find its place among the stars and consume itself in a blaze of glory, the light of which will not reach the earth for a thousand years. That is _duende_.

You say, seems easy enough to understand.

He says, that’s such a _you_ thing to say.

He says, you have been burning up the sky all your life.

_star.  
_ You ask if he can say _love_ in six different languages. He smiles, takes a sip from your glass of water and says, it sounds beautiful in every language but Japanese. There is something unnatural about _aishiteru_ , like it’s the kind of thing you only pull out when one of you is going to die.

You ask how he would say _love_ in Japanese, and he says, you’ll find out when I come home.

_tadaima.  
_ You are in the arrivals hall playing a rhythm game on your phone, because your hands need something to do but your mind is miles away. You are tapping your way to a respectable score when the notice board flips. _Landed._ Your finger slips. It takes a while for you to stand up. It takes a while to sink in that you will be face to face again soon. In the split second that it does, you are one of those stars.


End file.
